Predatory Publisher Organizes Conference Using Same Name as Legitimate Conference

Avoid at all costs.

The predatory publisher WASET (World Association of Science, Engineering and Technology) is organizing a conference using the exact same name as a legitimate conference on the same topic, a conference sponsored by a small and authentic scholarly society.

Both conferences are called International Conference on Educational Data Mining. The legitimate conference is organized by the International Educational Data Mining Society.

The legitimate conference.

The registration fee for the bogus conference is €500, but the registration fee for the legitimate conference is not yet announced.

An email sent by International Educational Data Mining Society president Ryan Baker warns society members about the WASET copycat event.

The email points out that the 2014 bogus educational data mining conference included paper presentations that were way off topic. The email states,

In 2014, this conference included EDM-themed papers such as “Automotive Supply Chain Flexibility” and “Energy Saving Potential with Improved Concrete in Ice Rink Floor Designs.”

It is clear from looking at WASET‘s homepage that it offers dozens of conferences to researchers every year. It regularly holds numerous conferences at the same time in the same city. It easily and routinely accepts papers regardless of whether they match the conference topic, and many are of very low quality.

WASET conferences provide a way for researchers to get university-paid vacations in interesting cities, along with easy acceptance of conference papers and subsequent easy acceptance of journal article submissions.

I strongly recommend that scholars avoid WASET conferences and that they also avoid submitting papers to WASET journals.

By the way I just looked up WASET’s schedule. They have 103 conferences next year alone. And each one deals with aviation, business, linguistics, chemistry, math, beekeeping, and anything else you want to talk about. Costs you 500 euros to present a paper. More if you want it published in conference proceedings afterwards. This has to be a serious money-maker.

I’m a science reporter at a newspaper in Canada. I have approached some of these publishers with an entirely fake paper to see whether they would accept it. Most did. The problem is that they pretend to be ethical. So typically their websites do list an editorial board, an ethics policy and peer review policy and the rest — but none of it is true. All they want is money. In my case their “peer review” accepted a paper that was half geology and half medicine, in alternating pieces, and all of them plagiarized. It made no sense but it passed. And when I wrote back to say by the way it’s plagiarized, that was OK with them. They just wanted money.